Piracy, Streams and Free and Open Source Software

Well did you ever broke the law and downloaded and used pirated (cracked or hacked) version of certain software?

I can bet that the vast majority of you did. May that be just because some program did not offer trail version or was way too expensive (couple hundred euros/dollars) or you just don’t want to pay for it, most of us did it.

Yes even I pirated, once heavily now not so much or rather not at all. Checking my devices I have only pirated version of windows on one of my PCs, that I use only for gaming. Giving 100-200$ for only running couple of games is something I think I would not do. If League of Legends and World of Warcraft had Linux versions I would not have a reason to run Windows on any of my devices.

And yes I even mean your phones, because today with all these smartphones platform, software development has been brought to next level. And piracy is just one of the things that comes with it.

Honestly today Free software and Open Source software can fulfill any of your needs, for problems that you previously need proprietary software now you can do with easy on FOSS.

Of course approach might be bit different and UI might be even completely different, and on first glance you might say you cannot work on it or that this new program is “crap”, because it does not work or look the same way your used to, but that’s not true at all. Many FOSS can do same if not better job in their respective area.

It just requires one thing of you to do, try to adept and learn it!

It is not as hard as you might think!

Yes you might need one or two days more just to learn how to do this or that but once you do your good to go.

Remember first time you tried to do something if Photoshop or Word? Yeah it took a lot to learn, but you did it. Now just repeat that process again but now are not 90’ or beginning of 21st century, internet is a lot more powerful tool now then It was then, use it!

Learn in just couple of searches on your preferred searched engine buy finding good tutorials and guides online. So yeah that process of learning new stuff should be a lot faster now. And try to use your already gathered knowledge by connecting similar objects from your old program and the ones in new one.

Only difference is that now you don’t have to pay couple hundred bucks for that app, every time new version comes out or your yearly subscription times out.

And so in software realm open source and free software did not impact that much in way of reducing piracy as much streaming services did in media realm.

Streaming Music and Video are rocking media world today. (2013 is current year People!)

People spend more time watching Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Twitch.tv/Justin.tv or VODs then watching Cable TV and more and more people use services like Spotify, Rdio, GrooveShark, Dezeer and similar too listen music. No more 20GB off music libraries on your hard drive, just select song you like and your service will stream it too you. Always up-to-date hi-quality songs. Of course this has one issue it requires internet connection, but if you want most of these services can just store your favorite songs locally on your device. Heck a lot of people just play what they want over Youtube!

Honestly I cannot remember last time I watches or powered my TV or run my FM radio or play songs locally.

And yeah I just got that all of this just looks like a commercial or ad for these services, sorry for that, not intentional, but I maybe jumped from topic a bit (Heck that’s why I run this site to talk about shit I want) but what I wanted to say is that a lot of people just stopped downloading pirated songs and movies and just started to stream them.

Why is this so efficient you may ask? Well would you rather pay nothing or up to 10 $ a month to get unlimited streamed content like music and movies (that you are most likely gonna watch once) or pay 10 $ to buy one movie or album, that you are going to store on your hard drive or CD and still watch once!

Yes there is issues of not being able to use these services in some countries, yes laws suck! So do majority of right holders, who don’t want their content delivered in some countries.

Added bonus if you are privacy freak Open Source software allows you to see actual code and be 100% sure that nobody is stealing your data or tracing you!

All-an-all I am really pleased to say that I have stopped pirating, I do create content myself so stealing content is something I really hated doing.

Do you use FOSS or streamed services and did it impacted yours way of consuming digital content?

Did you stopped pirating thanks to FOSS and streaming services?

Tell me that in comments.

Thank you for finishing my little article, thank you for your time and enjoy your day good sir.

2 Comments

Shakti Dwivedi
October 6, 2013

I switched to Xubuntu in 2012. Fell in love with it and started publicizing it in my uni. The scenario today is that my uni has totally shifted to FOSS, most laptops on the campus are using ubuntu or some derivate of it. University library and labs are running on fedora. Stepping out of windows has been a good experience so far.